Many-body interatomic potentials to model radiation damage in reactor pressure vessel steels and in-core components

We present a series of many-body interatomic potentials of use in atomistic simulations to model radiation damage in structural components of nuclear light-water reactors. A new Fe-Cu and Fe-Cu-Ni potential to represent reactor pressure vessel steels is developed. The Fe-Ni potential, developed as part of the ternary potential, can also be used in a first approximation to represent austenitic (stainless) steels, which is the material of choice for the reactor's in-core components. We emphasize that, to the best of our knowledge, our Fe-Cu-Ni potential represents the first example of a ternary many-body potential to study radiation damage. Due to the many-body character of our potential, results obtained with it are easily transferrable between different atomistic techniques, as opposed to other multi-component cohesive models currently found in the literature.